FSFE Newsletter – August 2014

Privilege and Power

In the olden days a common citizen of a republic going about their
everyday business was quite, shall we say, free. While tending to their
chores they would occasionally need a new tool or some advice, but the
old Latin proverb scientia potentia est dictated the limits of
their freedom to be the limits of their knowledge: if they needed a new
tool and lacked the knowledge to make it, they became dependent on the
toolmaker only to obtain the tool.

In the brave new world it is different: not only do we depend on the
toolmaker when we wish to obtain a new tool, but oft we remain dependent
on them forever after. In the olden days a hammer could be used both to
put stakes in the ground (or vampires) and nail planks atop the
vampire's coffin. Today, the customer buying a general purpose tool has
to pay twice for it: once to put stakes in the vampire and then again to
nail planks atop its coffin.

This is great if you happen to be one of the few toolmakers: not only
are they one of the few privileged to be in control of their
own property, but they have also stripped the rest of us of our rights
and have the power to command our tools and hence have the power over
us. Unfortunately, the privilege blinds them to the situation's
revoltingness.

Times have not been kind and, in addition to the revolting consequences
of failed regulations and cold, unjust, profit-oriented business logic,
we have been treated with a revelation after a revelation of agencies
and offices founded to protect us, and subsequently given an impossible
mission, preying on us. These developments, while despicable, can at
least be rationally understood.

If the danger to privacy and freedom were not so grave, the latter's
technical ineptitude and arguments utterly unsuitable to the birthplace
of liberalism would be highly amusing. Yet the danger posed by people
who have been corrupted by power or greed is real and our resolve to
confront that danger with more decentralization, security, privacy, and
anonymity must become ever greater.

We are all Targets

According to
new revelations
from early July pretty much anyone in the technological community is a
target for surveillance. Among other activities we have been, or will
be picked out, for visiting the
Tor website, reading the
Linux Journal, connecting to
Mixminion anonymous remailer service,
and downloading Tails, a
privacy-sensitive GNU/Linux distribution. These sobering facts ought to
be remembered every hour, every day. In the end our greatest weapon is
developing and promoting projects that will one day land people
interested in them on that very same list.

Something Completely Different

FSFE will have a booth at
FrOSCon, where our Vice
President Matthias Kirschner
will also give a
talk
on the demise of the general purpose computer.

Kevin Keijzer writes about
receiving TV using a DVB-T USB dongle. For our
more adventurous readers we suggest tuning the receiver to
1090 MHz and obtaining an overview of the local civilian air air
traffic as reported by ADS-B transmitters on the aircraft.

Sergey Matveev reports on
the GoVPN daemon
he wrote in the Go programming language.